CALL FOR PAPERS
CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT: The Vampire Across Popular Culture

INTERNATIONAL VAMPIRE FILM AND ARTS FESTIVALTransylvania, Romania May 25-28, 2017http://www.ivfaf.com

The second annual International Vampire Film and Arts Festival will take place in Sighisoara in Transylvania, Romania, on May 25th ‐ 28th 2017.

Theme: CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT:
The Vampire Across Popular Culture
Curating University: SETON HILL UNIVERSITY
Keynote Speaker: JEFFREY WEINSTOCK (The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema, 2012)

This call for papers is for scholars interested in presenting their work in the academic symposium that runs alongside the Festival (in association with Seton Hill University). Two other academic themes are being solicited, as well: Kutztown University will host a day on (En)Gendering the Vampire, and Emerson College is running a theme on The Vampire on Screen: Life Death and Immortality. You can read their calls for papers at the IVFAF website. The following description is from Seton Hill University’s theme on “The Vampire Across Popular Culture”:

From horrific monsters to romantic heroes, on cereal boxes and in video games, the vampire is a figure that appears everywhere in popular culture today. What makes the vampire so appealing across so many media, and so many genres? How are creative writers and filmmakers employing the figure within popular genres, and how does it effect our conception of those genres? What accounts for this Gothic character’s undying popular appeal, even in today’s postmodern, digital, commercialized world? How does vampirism circulate within and comment upon mass culture?

This session invites papers in genre theory, transmedia, adaptation, folklore, the transformative arts and other areas of film, literary and cultural studies in order to explore the various appearances of vampires in pop culture, and to unfold the significance of this eternally vibrant character in diverse texts worldwide. Papers would be selected to broadly represent different examples, emphasizing the cultural significance of the vampire.

Proposals for single 20‐minute papers or pre‐constituted panels (of 3 x 20‐minute papers) on the conference theme are now welcomed from scholars. Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

Remakes and Remixes of Stoker’s Dracula or other conventional vampire texts

The Impact of Popular Culture or Non‐Gothic Genres on Dracula, Varney, Carmilla and Other Classic Vampire Texts

Vampire Fiction as Subgenre

The Vampire Outside of Gothic/Horror Film and Literature

Vampire Comedies

Vampire Romances

Urban Fantasy or other Genre Hybrids

The Vampire in Young Adult literature

The Vampire’s Role in Genre Evolution

The Vampire as Metaphor in Journalism and New Media

The Lessons of Failed Vampire Films/Books

Unconventional Vampires as Signs of Cultural Change

The Popular Vampire in the Literary Mainstream

The Evolution of Sex and Religion in Vampire Literature

The Influence of Cinema on Literary Vampires (and vice‐versa)

Vampiric Tropes in Social Networking, Internet Memes and New Media Culture

Popular Vampire Fiction/Film in the Non‐Western World

Pedagogical Applications of Popular Vampire Texts

Vampire Literature and Film for Young Readers vs. Adults

Gender and the vampire and/or the vampire hunter

Vampires and the depiction of alternative sexualities

Women and the Vamp

Other Cultural Studies Applications of the Vampire Icon

This conference theme is curated by Dr. Michael Arnzen and Dr. Nicole Peeler, sponsored by the MFA in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University. http://fiction.setonhill.edu/

Submit abstracts (500 words maximum) via email only to arnzen@setonhill.eduno later than February 1st, 2016. If submitting a full panel proposal, include all three proposals along with a summary (50 words maximum) of the panel’s central topic written by the moderator. Accepted submitters must confirm commitment to attend and present their own original work at the conference in Transylvania.

The three day Academic Conference will be staged within the historic citadel of Sighisoara, birthplace of Vlad Dracula. For information on conference registration and location, visit www.ivfaf.com

The Onion’s AV Club ran a great list of “23 Ridiculous Horror Movies” called “Night of the Killer Lamp” back in 2007. It’s actually a great list of films that would make for a fun marathon night of creepy-kookie horror films. What it proves, too, is that a) the horror genre is rife with “uncanny” objects at the center of their narratives (e.g. possessed dolls, plants and animals that have human agency, inanimate objects that move of their own accord, etc.), and that, b) the uncanny is often funny…especially when it fails.

One of many on the list is Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, which is hilarious but in my view also a very important film in the pantheon of the uncanny (see my essay in the book, The Films of Stephen King). For a quick example, here’s the soda machine scene, from youtube.

So how does it fail? Is a killer soda machine not scary? If not, what makes it inherently goofy?

I won’t go into a close reading of this particular scene. It’s easy enough to understand through the theory of the uncanny itself. One answer might be that the uncanny — like all fiction — requires a willing suspension of disbelief…but that the ideas here are so ludicrous that we are unwilling to do so. If our mental mastery remains in charge of our experience, keeping the “belief” in animistic actions at bay, then we invest no autonomous power or agency into the object.

In other words, we know they are puppets on a string. We must genuinely believe that the string has been cut when the puppet starts to dance in order to truly experience the uncanny.

Special effects are always attempting to cut that string. The low budget nature of these films (or simply their datedness, as effects have evolved) may prevent us from believing in their magic.

Even so, it may not be fair to entirely dismiss all the “killer lamp” films as simply “ridiculous.” There are moments in each of them — some more than others — where the uncanny can be experienced due mostly to the power of cinema technology to animate inanimate objects and thereby bring them to life. Hardcore realists might be too steeled up against the ludicrous to really suspend disbelief, but there remains something regressive about these films that might account for their sense of being ludicrous in the first place. They are aggressively regressive. They force us to engage in a childlike belief in the worlds they project. They work hard to resurrect our childish (or as Freud put it, “surmounted”) beliefs in a world where anything can potentially hold life and move on its own. Our laughter may very well be a defense mechanism against this return to our earlier beliefs — an attempt to affirm that our adult selves have surmounted them, in collective laughter.

Freud: “…a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and…there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.”

When I first saw this twisted comedic film, I laughed at its outrageousness. You might be horrified or you might guffaw. It speaks for itself in a mere five seconds. Here’s it is: 5SecondFilms’“Magic Show Volunteer” (2009):

After I recoiled from the unexpected in this “magic show,” I immediately wanted to share it with others. I had the “you’ve gotta see this” reaction that compels so many of us to share these sorts of things online in social media. I copied the link and was ready to press “send” on my twitter account. But then I realized something. It was a magic show skit. Hadn’t I seen something like this before?

And I had. Many of us have. These kinds of films, which are everywhere on the internet because so many people have access to the technology to make them now, are identical to the very first movies ever made. Here, for example, is a famous example from about 115 years ago, when the early “one reelers” were being exhibited to public amazement: George Melies’ “The Magician” (1898):

Just as early film makers were exploring the creative capacity of the medium, today millions are doing the same thing — with a range of success and failure — using the ubiquitous capacities of phone apps, tablets, webcams, camcorders and similar devices which can point, shoot, edit and share with an audience in a matter of minutes. I have one myself, and I’m playing around with it quite a bit, which is also leading me to start researching this stuff on youtube (subscribe to my channel) more and more. What I’m finding is that the most successful of them exploit editing and sound in order to trick the eye and confound expectations, which give them a foot in the cinema of the uncanny.

In writing about early cinema, film critic Tom Gunning termed this genre the “cinema of attractions” — film’s equivalent to the circus sideshow, where the spectacle is everything and the narrative is scant or completely unnecessary. Before roughly 1906, film had not yet converted over to the dominant narrative format that we know so well in most Hollywood films today, which continues to draw from 19th Century narrative structure. YouTube makes no such pretense (perhaps because when it got started, YouTube would limit postings to 5 minutes in length, which led to widespread sharing of quirky videos akin to America’s Funniest Home Videos — which, incidentally, just aired it’s 500th episode — more than anything else). The bulk of the experience of such shared videos cues its viewers in much the same way as the early cinema of attractions, especially in its reference to the “magic” of what we are shown.

In her essay, “You Tube: The New Cinema of Attractions,” critic Theresa Rizzo does a masterful job both situating such videos into the tradition of this genre, but also exploring what marks online video sharing as unique: “although YouTube clips arrest our attention and encourage us to gawk similarly through novelty and curiosity throughout the course of a day, they also invite us to respond and participate in a variety of ways.” Thus, instead of turning to your neighbor in the theater seats and saying “wow,” we can say “wow” (and much more) right back to the filmmakers in an online comment or foment our own viral marketing campaign through an international form of “word of mouth” advertising on facebook, twitter, and elsewhere. Such shared videos can also be remediated — transported into different media or even remixed. “The cinema of attractions is ultimately about acts of display, or exhibitionism rather than storytelling in a similar way remediation is all about showing off by being clever and creative. It is a self-conscious practice that points to the producer, itself and to the power of the medium.”

I am, of course, fascinated and enthralled by short cinema and all the online activity we see with such texts. I think there is a grand democratization of art happening right now, which is wonderful (despite my skepticism about much of it — see my essay “Mock Band: The Simulation of Artistic Processes” for more on that). But the main interest for me is the role of the uncanny in communicating “the power of the medium”…which often is figured as a technology with autonomous, supernatural agency. This power is interesting to read as a symptom of social or personal anxiety, and often deifies technology in ways intended to either disavow agency or sell products through commodity fetishism (e.g. consumer technology IS a commodity). Melies wasn’t selling anything but himself. His “camera” was a magic wand. Today, magic wands are camcorders in the hands of the masses, available to all — for a price — and if we want, we can “magically” edit our stories, our personal history, our record of events. This is a manifestation of the popular uncanny.

In the Five Second Film about “The Magic Show Volunteer” our spectacular laughter relies on the taboos that are encroached here, regarding violence against pregnant women. It is not so difficult to give a feminist critique to something so clearly gendered in its representation of power. The male magician, a staging of authority, literally appropriates the “uncanny” nature of organic childbirth (“popping” the belly in a horrific way (clearly a balloon is pricked) — almost as if the woman’s body was something artificial, like a doll — before ‘birthing’ the child from his mouth). This topsy-turvy figuration of “male birth” is a common trope in uncanny horror film (and reaches all the way back to Shelley’s Frankenstein). It is an aggressive fantasy that a Freudian might read as an Oedipal nightmare as much as a gross-out joke, with the “father figure” of the fanciful magician responsible for “disappearing” the child, swallowing it off screen and “magically” pulling the newborn from his throat on its umbilical tourniquet. All of this “magic” — the taboo male fantasy of the text — is performed by cinematic technology, and its placement in the cinema of attractions renders it safe, domestic…and perhaps far too easily reproduced and reinforced as a social message.

Or maybe it’s just funny, and we’re invited to laugh at the male fantasy it presents. Perhaps the gimmicky magic it offers up is mocked, and this is a parody of itself. I’m uncertain. That, too, is inherent to the uncanny.

I have a short story in the new issue of Diabolique magazine and was excited to see that it also includes a good feature story by Brandon Kosters called “Toys of Terror” — a good overview of the appearance of “scary dolls” as baddies in horror film (from Chucky in Child’s Play to Corky in Magic). Kosters cites Freud’s theory of the Uncanny as central to the attraction of this trope: “…children in their early games, make no sharp distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and…they are especially fond of treating their dolls as if they were alive.” He goes on to suggest that it is not only the “return” of these surmounted beliefs from childhood that make the dolls uncanny, but also that these films are “uniquely upsetting because there is an element of betrayal when we surrender to the adult world.” This may account for the violence associated with these particular dolls…I hadn’t really thought about it that way before. Kosters provides a good overview of this classic icon of the uncanny in horror cinema since the 60s.

I’ll try to update this entry with the archives afterward, if you can’t attend.

The panel, hosted by Christine Jarvis, and featuring Drs. Paul Armstrong, Michele Paule, Libby Tisdell and myself, was a very engaging and lively discussion of popular culture in the classroom and in the lived experience of its audience today. Paule raised issues related to the changing ideology of “girlhood” in popular film; Armstrong raised questions related to how television shows like The Simpsons play into political engagement; Tisdell raised notions related to the realistic ability of film to actually transform a learner’s thinking; I discussed my teaching of The Exorcist in different contexts, and how horror texts can provide that “activating event” for rethinking assumptions (drawing from my essay, The Unlearning). A lively discussion transpired.

On the Uncanny . . .

…meaningful coincidences are unthinkable as pure chance — the more they multiply and the greater and more exact the correspondence is…they can no longer be regarded as pure chance, but, for the lack of causal explanation, have to be thought of as meaningful arrangements.